The Anchor is card number 35 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows an anchor. In the tradition its core sense is stability, persistence, work and, at times, the hope that holds fast; a settled foundation, especially in employment.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 9 of Spades, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the anchor takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Der Anker. As House 35 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on stability, steady work and persistence over time. In combination, Anchor followed by Fish reads as stable, secure income, while Anchor preceding Ship reads as a journey held in place, delayed rather than cancelled, echoing the card's role in the original 1799 Game of Hope, where landing on the Anchor square held a player in place rather than advancing or sending them back, one of the few Lenormand meanings that can be traced directly to a specific rule of the game the deck descends from.